The Future of Memory

By Antony Rowland

Memory studies has become a rapidly growing area of scholarly as well as public interest. This volume brings together world experts to explore the current critical trends in this new academic field. It embraces work on diverse but interconnected phenomena, such as twenty-first century museums, shocking memorials in present-day Rwanda and the firsthand testimony of the victims of genocidal conflicts. The collection engages with pressing ‘real world’ issues, such as the furor around the recent 9/11 memorial, and what we really mean when we talk about ‘trauma’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781845458478

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I. THE FUTURE OF MEMORY

The Future of Memory: Introduction

Rick Crownshaw

In response to the avalanche of memory discourses that have become the stuff of Western public spheres and informed academic enquiry in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, Andreas Huyssen rejects the idea that this ‘hypertrophy’ of memory can only be met by a Nietzschean forgetting.¹ What, after all, are the differences between active forgetting and selective remembrance? Instead, Huyssen argues that the remembrance of the past must be accompanied by the remembrance of the future.² Not only has modern utopian thought been replaced by an obsession with the past, he argues, but the future has been reconfigured along the lines of neoliberal fantasies of globalisation. It is these fantasies that then threaten to become part of the archive (when the future becomes the past), and the catastrophes of the twentieth century, informed as they are by variants of the very capitalism and technology that fuel globalisation, are effectively forgotten.³ Nevertheless:

We need both past and future to articulate our political, social, and cultural dissatisfactions with the present state of the world. And while the hypertrophy of memory can lead to self-indulgence, melancholy fixations, and a problematic privileging of the traumatic dimension of life with no exit in sight, memory discourses are absolutely essential to imagine the future and to regain a strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space.⁴

Put another way, the future of memory studies entails remembering what a better future might look like; that is, different from the remembered catastrophes of the past and their legacies in the present. A remembrance of what the future should look like allows a critical distance on the present and its historicisation. Memory and memory studies must be future-orientated. The opening up of memory to the future means that memory studies must be less certain of what it will find in the past (as Jane Kilby argues later in this volume in relation to engagements with trauma in particular) and of what it will prescribe in the future. As Dan Stone remarks in this volume, the methodologies of memory studies have often given rise to a teleological apprehension of past events. In such schema, memory work is in effect already given to the past because its course has been decided, and so the future of memory has already happened and been perfected. If memory studies is not to dictate the past and the future, much then depends on its methodologies and how they relate to and inform acts of remembrance. Otherwise, as Stone argues (cautiously following Paul Ricoeur), memory studies aligns itself with the commemorative rather than the memorative. Commemoration results from the divorce of history from memory, the disarticulation of their interdependence, the unmooring of history from the particularities of witnessing and testimony. It is these particularities that obstruct commemoration’s desire to conclude upon past events.

Sara Guyer’s contribution to this volume finds that the Nyamata, Nyarubuye and Murambi memorials to victims of the genocide of Tutsis (April 1994) are commemorative. On the one hand, the memorials cannot remember the victims outside of the logic of genocide – victims are objectified by the process of memorialisation in a way that parallels their objectification by the processes of mass murder – and, on the other, they cannot specify acts of genocide. These memorials’ failure to individualize death and return proper names to the dead can only collectivise the victims as did the perpetrators: genocide is commemorated as genocide. At these memorial sites, bones and bodies are left to speak for themselves – death is impersonal, victims are unnamed – suggesting not that genocide resists meaning but in this case that genocide is historically meaningless. What remains at these sites, or rather the orchestration of what remains at these sites, Guyer argues, imparts a ‘radical non-difference’ between what might be called historical and natural death. The impersonality of genocide is collapsed into the impersonality of death itself. When only ‘bones remain, the demand for absent testimony also remains’. What remains, then, is commemoration.

That artefacts are left to speak for themselves might provoke (leave them vulnerable to) memory work that is appropriative. Indeed current theories of collective memory risk transforming sites of remembrance into realms of over–identification, as in, for example, Alison Landsberg’s conception of ‘prosthetic memory’. A theory and methodology of memory studies is needed that will historicise the act of recall and take into consideration the possibility of traumatic affect. Alison Landsberg’s conception of ‘prosthetic memory’ is promising. Prosthetic memories are enabled by the modern technologies of mass cultural communication and by the way that mass culture is commodified; they are remembered in spaces or ‘experiential sites’ produced by commodification and the use of technology, such as the museum and cinema.⁵ The interface with historical narratives made possible at these sites generates in the consumers memories of events not directly experienced and which are ‘not socially constructed in that they do not emerge as the result of living or being raised in particular social frameworks’.⁶ In other words, these are memories that do not ‘traditionally’ belong to the consumer’s group or identity – defined in terms of the particularities of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nation, and so on – but which may be acquired in spite of those particularities. Made available by their mass distribution and circulation, memory is freed from the biological or essentialist claims of particular individuals or groups and may be claimed but not owned by others.⁷ The itinerant and liminal nature of prosthetic memory, argues Landsberg, means that the alterity of the ‘other’ remains intact, and that ‘other’ is not the subject of over-identification.⁸ Prosthetic memory builds on Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’⁹ that were enabled by mass cultural technologies of the nineteenth century, as well as on Maurice Halbwachs’s theorisation that social frameworks are the instruments by which collective memory is formed and expressed.¹⁰ Anderson and Halbwachs describe the way that collective memory of events not experienced is used to shore up group or national identity; Landsberg describes a model of memory that is centrifugal in its dispersal of memory beyond group ownership or heritage.¹¹

Landsberg positions prosthetic memory between the individual and the collective:

memories … ‘speak’ to the individual in a personal way as if they were actually memories of lived events …. Prosthetic memories are neither purely individual nor entirely collective but emerge at the interface of individual and collective experience. They are privately felt public memories that develop after an encounter with a mass cultural representation of the past, when new images and ideas come into contact with a person’s own archive of experience.¹²

Arguably, the in–between–ness of prosthetic memory frees it from the mediations of the collective, the individual, and the experiential or transferential site. Take, for example, Landsberg’s reading of the exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) of shoes from the Majdanek death camp:

A visitor’s ability to have a prosthetic relationship to those objects, I would argue is predicated on the object’s indexicality — on its ‘realness’ and materiality – but it is also predicated on each visitor’s sense of who he or she is. There is a simultaneous negotiation of the object (and the other that it represents) and with a person’s archive of experiences. At the same moment that we experience the shoes as their shoes – which could very well be our shoes – we feel our own shoes on our feet. The disinvestment that the objects represent can be traumatic only if we feel all the while ourselves.¹³

Transference in such sites is the converse of the clinical scenario, the dynamic of which is externalizing.¹⁴ In the museum, ‘we take on prosthetic memories … incorporate these symptoms … simultaneously giving over our bodies to these mute objects. We take on their memories and become their prostheses’.¹⁵ Given the symptomology, the assumption is one of traumatisation, whatever the archive of ‘personal experience’ to which these objects are related.¹⁶ Questions notwithstanding of whether such a display can actually traumatise (or provoke traumatising memories in its viewer), Landsberg’s prescription of transference and its symptoms overrides a consideration of the way the museum orchestrates the affectiveness of this exhibit (what might be called the exhibitionary mis-en-scène), the way in which the exhibit contributes to and draws from an iconology of Holocaust representation.

The potential variety of subject positions and how they might speak for such mute objects is not considered by Landsberg. Subjectivity here is shorn of its particularities. Prosthetic memory is also unmediated by the institution itself, the transferential site. While the act of recall is site-specific, Landsberg does not consider the discourses that structure the site, beyond, in this case, a general sense of the commodification of memory. What of the Americanisation of Holocaust remembrance, and attendant politics of memory, for which the Washington museum in particular has been indicted? Can prosthetic memory really transcend the politics and commodification of memory, which have enabled it in the first place, to constitute a counter-hegemonic public sphere? Then again, Landsberg argues that ‘Prosthetic Memory … is less interested in large-scale social implications and dialectics than in the experiential quality of prosthetic memory and its ramifications of those memories for individual subjectivity and political consciousness’. By ‘large-scale social implications’,¹⁷ Landsberg has in mind the dialectic of remembering and forgetting in contemporary memorial culture, or, put another way, the way that monuments and museums shape the past, producing a politics of memory. Prosthetic memory, then, presumes to transcend the discourses, institutions and ideologies that structure transferential sites and mediate remembrance in them: all in the name of the formation of an abstract, individual, political consciousness for the future and the nebulous collective memory it informs.

In this volume, Gaynor Bagnall and Antony Rowland’s examination of the Imperial War Museum North’s (IWMN’s) foregrounding of the aestheticisation (and narrativisation) of artefactual objects provides a contrary reading of such would-be prostheses. Bagnall and Rowland attend to the mediation of artefacts where Landsberg’s theoretical regime might strip them of mediation. They argue that the IWMN offers a metacommentary on museum practice in which exhibitionary narratives are naturalised by their presentation of artefacts as direct extensions of the past events for which they stand. The denaturalization of artefactual objects is ‘discombobulating’, but discombobulation works in other ways elsewhere in the museum. In the IWMN’s ‘Holocaust cabinet’ the provenance of particular artefacts is unclear: photographs of victims, a prisoner’s clogs from Birkenau, and a uniform from Majdanek are displayed without the names of their previous owners, which are presumably unknown. The lack of provenance calls attention to the limits of display in that exibitionary presence cannot compensate for loss. These limits invoke the possibility of secondary witnessing (‘imaginative projections are thereby sometimes the only way of making any (inevitably compromised) sense out of absence’). This is not the same thing as prosthesis; the display evokes an unsettling relation to the traumatic referent but does not convey trauma itself. Discombobulation never, though, frees artefactual meaning from the mediations of the museum: ‘we would argue that the Holocaust cabinet highlights the impossibility of reversing the process of reification when it is not obvious what the objects refer to even before they enter the museum’.

For Amy Hungerford, the desire in academic theory to share the witness’s experience, perceived to be directly transmissible via certain types of literary, historiographical, psychoanalytical, and philosophical language and textuality, or artefact, leads to what she describes as the personification of texts.¹⁸ In other words, the text is understood to have embodied the witness’s experience, which can be accessed by reading (or viewing) and then re–embodied by the reader (viewer). In short, this is the memorisation of someone else’s memory.¹⁹ We might extend personification to the artefacts in the Washington museum, where they would be imagined to ‘have the capacity to embody experience’, and ‘to be conscious’.²⁰ Where it has been argued that prosthetic memory is actually an abstraction of the identities of those who remember and those who are remembered, Hungerford argues a similar despecification: ‘conflation of texts and persons impoverishes our ideas … of persons, since it renders the fact of embodiment irrelevant, when embodiment is exactly what situates us in history and makes us vulnerable to oppression’.²¹ The prosthetic relation between visitor and the museum artefact/text, which embodies the victim, strips both original and secondary witness of their particularity. Whereas Landbserg sees prosthetic memory as transformative in the way it might shape our political consciousness and actions in the future, Hungerford sees personification as overly prescriptive.²² By reducing bodies to texts and cancelling the differences between them, the existence of those remembered (victims) and those remembering vicariously is scripted.²³ The insistence on experiential over historical knowledge of the Holocaust prescribes no other identity in the present than that of the vicarious victim chained to its historical counterpart. Hungerford advocates that victims be consigned to history rather than recovered in the present by the act of imagining what they suffered, that loss be conceded as irreversible. Death, then, makes imaginable ‘the absolute otherness one is not’. Otherwise, the future of memory would be an ‘unfreedom’.²⁴

At issue here is the relation between affect and the futurity of memory. Hungerford finds that personification, in collapsing the distinctions between the remembering self and the remembered other, issues prescriptions for that future. For Landsberg, the future-orientated nature of prosthetic remembrance – in the name of a political consciousness – is cause enough to move further away from historical specificity. On the grounds that ‘real’ and prosthetic memories are both reconstructions of the past, Landsberg sees the differences between them as unimportant, when the ‘generation of possible courses of action in the present’ is at stake.²⁵ It is not just the historical specificity of the witness’s experience that has been relegated. On the grounds that both history and memory subject the past to interpretation and narrative, history has no more privileged access to the real than memory, let alone prosthetic memory, making history replaceable by (prosthetic) memory.²⁶ Besides, for Landsberg a ‘cognitive’ apprehension of the Holocaust is ‘inadequate’, necessitating its supplementation by ‘experiential’ or prosthetic memory.²⁷ As Andrew Gross and Michael Hoffman have argued, the logic of Landsberg’s theory, representative of a wider tendency in memory and trauma studies, is that the limits of witness testimony in the face of the Holocaust call all historical narrative into doubt. If the witnesses did not fully understand what was happening to them, why should subsequent generations?²⁸ The past understood in terms of cause and effect, then, has been subsumed by cause and affect.²⁹

The question remains as to how to factor trauma into the transmission of memory, if at all. Marianne Hirsch’s seminal conception of ‘postmemory’ might be useful. Postmemory typically describes ‘the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right’.³⁰ Having defined the concept of postmemory in terms of ‘familial inheritance’, Hirsch has broadened its application to a more general, cultural inheritance that can transcend ethnic or national boundaries.³¹ Postmemory therefore is ‘defined through an identification with the victim or witness of trauma, modulated by an unbridgeable distance that separates the participant from the one born after …. Postmemory would thus be retrospective witnessing by adoption. It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences – and thus also the memories – of others as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story’.³² It is the belated nature of traumatic memory that fuels its transmission and adoption. If the traumatic nature of the event defies its own witnessing, cognition and remembrance, then, for Hirsch, it makes sense that the next generation is in a position to work through traumatic experience and its symptoms, narratives and images bequeathed but not fully remembered or known by the previous one.³³

Gary Weissman has remarked relatively recently that the notion of ‘monumental’ memories is ‘murky’.³⁴ ‘No degree of monumentality can transform one person’s lived memories into another’s.’³⁵ Weissman finds that Hirsch’s differentiation between survivor memory and postmemory rests on the matter of temporal distance rather than the substance of memory itself.³⁶ Weissman’s suspicion of terms such as ‘vicarious’, ‘secondary’, or ‘post’ memory and witnessing – terms which he argues rest on an over-extension of the concepts of memory, trauma, witnessing, and testimony – leads him to deploy the term ‘nonwitness’ in their stead.³⁷ Weissman’s critique of trends in the theory and practice of Holocaust memory, particularly but not only in North American culture, identifies what he terms ‘fantasies’ of witnessing. Such fantasies are partly driven by the desire for academic integrity in the confrontation with the Holocaust, in which the capacity to be traumatised by things and events not directly witnessed demonstrates a moral stamina, and a desire to make those events more real than in their mass mediation by Holocaust memory industries.³⁸

However, Weissman’s rightfully placed critical anxiety over the fantasy of witnessing in memory studies, and in the practice of cultural memory, prevents him from fully considering the possibility that trauma (of a kind) might be transmitted: that trauma might inform the remembrance of events not directly witnessed, and the relationship of witness to ‘nonwitness’ might be more proximate than he allows. To the contrary, Weissman argues that the Holocaust was not the rupture or paradigm-shifting event it was conceived to be, and has actually been absorbed and regulated by, in particular, American culture.³⁹ The fact that the Holocaust is all too representable and therefore mediated feeds back into charges (to which Rowland returns in the ‘The Future of Testimony’ in this volume) that the event is unrepresentable and that prior representation has been inauthentic.⁴⁰ The fantasies of witnessing that posit the event as transcendent have less to do with secondary traumatisation but are a retrospective attempt to instil a sense of rupture and to compensate for the lack of an adequate moral reaction to the Holocaust in the cultural imaginary.⁴¹ Although Weissman’s intention is to examine the paradoxical desire to experience the horrors of the Holocaust that are at the same time conceptualised, indeed, idealized, as sublime, his critical framing of these fantasies is not sufficiently contextualized, beyond an identification of a general and retrospective culture desire for authenticity and appropriately ethical response.

How then to theorise the remembrance of things not witnessed (particularly traumatic memory), avoiding the pitfalls of prosthesis, personification, and fantasy? This question could be asked other ways: how can historicity be returned to memory? How then to put the history back into memory and memory studies? Susannah Radstone has argued that memory studies has been informed by postmodern approaches to historical representation that sought to deconstruct the hierarchies that governed historical thinking in which social and the public experience is validated over the individual and private.⁴² The turn to memory is part of a broader, postmodern movement that saw the problematisation of the idea of the grand narrative, of ‘History’ and its claims to universality, totality and objectivity, and its substitution by lived experience – the local, subjective and partial — embodied by memory.⁴³ The turn to memory has not only reinscribed a binary opposition in which memory is validated over history, it has eclipsed history altogether. (Rowland returns to this problem in ‘The Future of Testimony’, where he discusses critics who dismiss historical narratives as inherently and simplistically positivistic.) The ‘inner world and its very processes has become predominant, and has been taken as the world’.⁴⁴ Under this academic regime, the memory in memory studies can become over-personalised at the expense of a wider historical context, and, without historical specificity, any object, discourse or practice can be taken as memory.⁴⁵ In a critique along related lines, which recalls what Landsberg finds in the museum, Kerwin Lee Klein has added that, given its new-found authority, and indeed autonomy, memory seems to have a life, or agency, of its own, freed from historical context, specificity and anchorage.⁴⁶ Memory, then, is understood to be a sole mediating force in that memory texts, be they memoirs or monuments, are read as direct reflections of the way that memory shapes the past.⁴⁷ While textual production may be historically specified – for example, as post-traumatic – what is often not considered are the specifics of the text (how its textual, formal and generic properties may mediate the past, along with the discourses that attend textual practice),⁴⁸ as well as how that text may be authorized. Memory studies needs also to attend to the specifics of the text’s authorization and mediation as memory text, ‘the ‘mediation of the already-mediated memory discourses, images, texts and representations by the institutions and discourses of the wider public sphere: institutions and discourses that may not be specifically ‘memorial’ themselves, but through which memory may be articulated’.⁴⁹

Critiques of memory studies have found that the overpersonalisation of memory is dehistoricising. Overpersonalisation has often been seen in the application to collectives of individual psychological and psychoanalytical definitions of experience. Radstone argues that the concept of trauma travels too easily in bridging the gap between the personal and the social and between ‘diverse cultural phenomena’.⁵⁰ Huyssen is sceptical about the transposition of psychoanalytical categories of trauma onto the public, historical sphere where remembrance takes place. Such a move remembers all of modernity as traumatic and victimizing, and all moderns as victims, condemning victimised groups to repetitive cycles of victimhood. For Huyssen, the idea of a traumatic collective memory rearticulates ‘Freudian phylogenetic fantasies’.⁵¹ The question remains as to how the individual and collective can be related.

Similarly sceptical about the overgeneralisation of trauma, Wulf Kansteiner argues that while models of collective memory often take into consideration social and institutional entities – the museum, the nation – that are mistakenly ascribed personal, psychological attributes, the issue of reception is neglected. ‘Collective memories originate from shared communications about the meaning of the past that are anchored in the life-worlds of individuals who partake in the communal life of the respective collective. As such, collective memories are based in a society and its inventory of signs and symbols’⁵², and subject to reception. Memory texts may be authorised by the institutions and discourses of the public sphere, but there is often a discrepancy between the intentionality of the authorizing agents, the intentions of that text (of its author or authors), the text itself, and its reception or consumption. (As Radstone has argued there is often an inclination in memory studies to render texts transparent). As Kansteiner reminds us, texts can be read against their authorizing agents’ and authors’ intentions, or not consumed at all as significant memory texts whatever the intention, and the medium of the text can refract or dislocate those intentions. Therefore, memory studies needs to pay increasing attention to the hermeneutical triangle of object, maker and consumer.⁵³

Scrutinies of memory studies (Stone’s, Klein’s, Kansteiner’s, Radstone’s) have questioned the tendencies of theories of memory to homogenize collective recollection. Like Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, Stone argues in this volume that a methodological rigour is needed that conceptualizes collective memory and its processes as ‘embedded in social networks’⁵⁴ – a conceptualization critical of explaining the collective via resort to models of individual memory. Nevertheless, Kansteiner’s relation of the individual to the collective, particularly via the notion of reception, prevents the latter from displacing the former altogether, and usefully frames the way James Young in this volume resists the homogenization of the collective, by distinguishing between ‘collected’ and ‘collective’ memory. The latter is an essentialising concept; the former is best reflected by the counter- or anti-redemptive monument – self-destructive or impermanent, unable to prescribe (the future of) memory to those who visit it, the meanings of which are authored by those visitors – which is able to frame competing versions of the past. Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s ‘Reflecting Absence’, the winning design of the World Trade Centre Memorial Competition, resists, in counter-monumental style, the redemption of catastrophe and gives form to a heteroglossic public culture for which it offers a focal point. As Young argues, both ‘Reflecting Absence’ and the proximate Freedom Tower, as part of the fabric of the urban community, give form to an evolving matrix of ‘memory and commerce, life and loss. In this vein, public memory of 9/11 remains an animated process, by which the stages of memory follow each other, from generation to generation to generation’.

While Kansteiner’s methodological suggestions bridge the individual and the collective, but trauma is not fully addressed. Dominick LaCapra, on the other hand, notes the universalisation of trauma in many versions of memory studies, but cautiously admits its transference and transmission. LaCapra’s concern with the universalisation of trauma via its representation is that it engenders endless mourning, or melancholia. The object of memory is transvalued from a negative – something that defies representation – into a positive sublime, which becomes the basis (cathection) of individual and group identity.⁵⁵ It is the conflation of texts and experience – ‘personification’ in Hungerford’s terms, or ‘fantasy’ in Weissman’s – that leads to an obsession over the aporia that structure the representation of traumatic memory. Those disruptions are detached from their specific historical referents to the extent that structural absences or traumas subsume historically specific losses or traumas.⁵⁶ The universalisation of loss ‘makes of existence a fundamentally traumatic scene’ affecting all relations.⁵⁷ The basis of identity is then foundation-less (without historical specificity), which means the collapse of any measure of the relation between identities and their traumas: the ‘relation between differentiated experiences of agents and subjects in the past and the differentiated experiences of observers or secondary witnesses’.⁵⁸

What is needed is a ‘middle voice’ by which the cultural producer can articulate historical experience in a mode that remains, through incomplete and disrupted representation, faithful to the witness’s perspective, without confusing structural for historical trauma, absence for loss. Modulated as such, the middle voice is thereby able to differentiate (or articulate the differences between) subject positions – primarily between perpetrator and victim, but also between direct and secondary witness – that would otherwise remain confused in a generalised scene of trauma: an ‘undifferentiated scene of horror and negative sublimity, a scene beneath or beyond ethical considerations’, which author and reader experience and in doing so lose their specific relation to the past.⁵⁹ As a focal point of collective remembrance, the middle voice registers that collective memory may be in part constituted by transference, illuminating the variegation of the collective and the different subject positions that inhabit it. The middle voice registers degrees of transference (or the lack of it), determined by subject position and the historical relationship and distance between those who remember and events/victims remembered, where other forms of historical representation may disguise, distort, disavow or homogenize the affect of past events, if positionalities and historical relationships have not already been universalised by the confusion of structural and historical trauma.⁶⁰

What then does the middle voice sound like or, when transcribed, look like, and just how is it articulated? LaCapra does not suggest that there is a stylistic formula⁶¹ but that an adequate voice (or form of historical representation) illuminates one’s pre-existing implication in transferential relations. It is the aporetic nature of the middle voice that opens up a space in which the addressers’ and addressees’, authors’ and recipients’, pre-existing relationship to trauma can be provoked and explored. The middle voice is an index to trauma; it is not inherently traumatic. This is fundamentally different from the idea of the text actually transmitting or directly reflecting trauma, of the conflation of representation/language and experience. It is in this space that a differential relationship to the traumatic event can be established, perpetrators can be distinguished from victims, witnesses from secondary witnesses, the universalisation of trauma and its victims stemmed, and relationships to the traumatic event illuminated rather than just claimed. LaCapra, then, admits the reverberations of the traumatic, but calls for a more modulated representation of affect. If the middle voice entails ‘an often disconcerting exploration of disorientation, its symptomatic dimensions, and possible ways of responding to them’, then the ‘crucial issue is how one responds to or comes to terms with that initial positionality – and here one confronts the issue of how to deploy various modalities of acting out, working over, and working through’.⁶² If the middle voice foregrounds one’s subject position, it allows a thinking through of the ethical ramifications of the perspectives that emanate from that position: although, as Hungerford might put it (contra Landsberg), identity here is not prescribed. Although the middle voice is not inherently traumatic – trauma does not inhere in language and discourse – it provides an index to traumatisation, and in doing so it allows engagement with, critical distance on and self–reflexivity towards transferential relations rather than their disavowal.

In sum, the future of memory studies might be wise to draw on La Capra’s concept of the middle voice, which generates a sense of ‘empathetic unsettlement’ in relation to (rather than over-identification with) past victims.⁶³ In this volume Susan Suleiman’s discussion of the work of Georges Perec and Raymond Federman identifies a literary strategy that LaCapra might describe as the ‘middle voice’. Federman’s novel Double or Nothing is understood as an ‘elaborate structure of saying and unsaying’ the murder of his mother, father, and two sisters: a ‘simultaneous denial and affirmation’ of reality that Suleiman theorises as fetishism. Moving beyond familiar arguments about the failure of language (derided by Weissman above), the structure of fetishism becomes a motor for Holocaust representation: ‘to keep repeating the same thing, but always as if for the first time, in other words differently’. The fetishism of Federman’s writing does not collapse experience and language – here structural absence is not the same as historical loss (LaCapra); the text does not personify experience (Hungerford) – but it does offer fidelity to his experience of traumatic loss staging both the acting out of that loss (repression) and its working through. Therefore literature and the identity it produces are not prescribed by past experience but future orientated.

Notes

1. A. Huyssen. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 6.

2. A. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 6.

3. A. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 6.

4. A. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 6.

5. A. Landsberg. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2.

6. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 19.

7. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 2–3

8. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 135.

9. B. Anderson. 1983. Imagined Communities, London: Verso.

10. Maurice Halbwachs. 1992. Lewis A. Coser (ed. and trans), On Collective Memory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

11. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 7–8.

12. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 19.

13. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 135.

14. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 135.

15. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 136.

16. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memoryy, 135–36.

17. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 20.

18. A. Hungerford. 2003. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

19. A. Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts, 119.

20. A. Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts, 119.

21. A. Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts, 21.

22. A. Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts, 151.

23. A. Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts, 155.

24. A. Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts, 151.

25. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 45.

26. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 47.

27. A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 131.

28. A. Gross, and M.J. Hoffman. 2004. ‘Memory, Authority and Identity: Holocaust Studies in Light of the Wilkomirski Debate’, Biography 27(1), 40.

29. A. Gross, and M.J. Hoffman, ‘Memory, Authority and Identity’, 38.

30. M. Hirsch. 2001. ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14(1), 9.

See also, M. Hirsch. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press.

31. M. Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images’, 9–10.

32. M. Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images’, 10.

33. M. Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images’, 12

34. G. Weissman. 2004. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 16–17.

35. G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, 17.

36. G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, 17.

37. G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, 20.

38. G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, 21–22, 24.

39. G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, 188–89.

40. G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, 209.

41. G. Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, 209.

42. S. Radstone. 2005. ‘Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory’, History Workshop Journal, 59, 140.

43. S. Radstone. 2000. ‘Screening Trauma: For rest Gump, Film and Memory’, in S. Radstone (ed..), Memory and Methodology, Oxford and New York, 84.

44. S. Radstone. 2005. ‘Reconceiving Binaries’, 140.

45. S. Radstone, ‘Reconceiving Binaries’, 140.

46. K.L. Klein. 2000. ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, 69, 136.

47. S. Radstone, ‘Reconceiving Binaries’, 135.

48. S. Radstone. 2008. ‘Memory Studies: For and Against’, Memory Studies 1(1), 30–39.

49. S. Radstone, ‘Reconceiving Binaries’, 137.

50. S. Radstone, ‘Memory Studies: For and Against’, 35.

51. Huyssen, Presents Pasts, 8–9.

52. W. Kansteiner. 2002. ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Memory Studies’, History and Theory, 41, 188.

53. Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Memory Studies’, 197.

54. A. Confino and P. Fritzsche (eds.). 2002. The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

55. D. LaCapra. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 23

56. D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 23.

57. D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 23–24.

58. D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 37.

59. D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 26–27.

60. D. LaCapra, 1996. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. London: Cornell University Press, 46.

61. D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 14.

62. D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 189, 36.

63. D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 27–28, 30, n31, 35.

1

Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute: The Future of Memory after the Age of Commemoration

Dan Stone

‘History can expand, complete, correct, even refute the testimony of memory regarding the past; it cannot abolish it.’¹

The ‘Mnemosyne Institute’ of my title refers to a story by Saul Bellow, ‘The Bellarosa Connection’.² The narrator, whose name we do not find out, is the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute in Philadelphia, and after forty years of successfully training ‘executives, politicians, and members of the defence establishment’ in what would be known to the Greeks as mnemotechnia or the Romans as ars memoriae, he retires, wishing to ‘forget about remembering’. This aspiration, as he immediately acknowledges, is ‘an Alice-in-Wonderland proposition’ (35): as Paul Ricoeur notes, in order to succeed, forgetting would have to outsmart its own vigilance and, as it were, forget itself.³ And whilst he will no longer train professionals in the use of their faculties, he will instead recall his own life. After all, his ‘main investment was in memory’ (37) and he could not simply forget it. He already knew that he was, like Funes, burdened with ‘so much useless information’ (52). In his retirement he tries, after an unexpected telephone enquiry, to track down old friends, the Fonsteins, with whom he has not been in contact for thirty years, only to discover that they are dead. In a conversation with a young man claiming to be a house-sitting friend of the Fonsteins’ son Gilbert, our narrator is stung by the youth’s snide comments about his ‘timing’ being ‘off’ (88). The story ends with the narrator’s angry reflections that ‘modern mental structures’ such as exhibited by this boy cannot be dismantled, and that such people can never understand ‘the roots of memory in feeling’ (89).

What is striking about this story – among other things that are less directly relevant here, such as the relation of memory to Jewish history – is that the narrator seems to lack awareness, despite his distrust of modern ways, that his Mnemosyne Institute is itself a typically modern phenomenon. Perhaps its existence confirms Pierre Nora’s claim from the introduction to Les lieux de mémoire of 1984 that ‘we’ are so obsessed by memory and the need to recall because we no longer ‘live in memory’.⁴ Or, less nostalgically, it could prove Andreas Huyssen’s point that the turn to memory is a reflection of our ever-accelerating present and our loss of historical consciousness.⁵ Memory in this reading not only anchors us in a supposedly stable past, granting us a feeling of continuity, but also becomes one of the tools of modern, technocratic, managerial efficiency, as in the training of professional personnel. Thus, the Mnemosyne Institute, whilst it connects its students to tradition, is also a symptom of modernity, it is an icon of an age overburdened with memory, and torn between a duty to remember the past, particularly its more terrible aspects, and a desire to break with tradition and celebrate the onward march of (technological) progress. An age, ours, which simultaneously does not know what to remember and what to forget, or how, and, as a consequence, is obsessed with commemoration.

It is no surprise that between the publication of the first volume of Les lieux de mémoire and the third in 1992, Nora’s argument changed so that he now argued that his book had itself become emblematic of the shift towards an attempt to recover ‘national memory’, and thus provided further evidence of the fact that western societies now live in an ‘age of commemoration’. This argument suggests that the age of obsessive commemoration in which we live is, in both Ricoeur’s and Tzvetan Todorov’s words, an ‘abuse of memory’. It is, in other words, a kind of phoney memory, one not ‘rooted in feeling’. The same, by implication, applies to the surging phenomenon of ‘memory studies’ that has been the scholarly equivalent of and contribution to this general cultural trend. Although the scholarly study of memory is not synonymous either with the contemporary obsession with commemoration or with the heritage industry and its ‘history spin’, nevertheless I will here run them together to some extent in the interest of provoking discussion. In this chapter I wish to ask: what will be the future of memory and ‘memory studies’ after the age of commemoration?

We have over the last few years become familiar with the wisdom of George Bush. As Governor of Texas he reportedly once said that ‘The future will be brighter tomorrow’ and on another occasion that ‘I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future’. He was of course indicating to those in the know his careful reading of Derrida, whose deconstruction led David Farrell Krell to proclaim, perhaps in a different context from Bush’s (who does not, one may surmise, get the double meaning) that ‘the future will have been perfect’.⁶

In a sense, we have here a clear statement of the problem facing us: memory has become too bright, too perfect. No wonder that Charles Maier argued already in 1993 that: ‘As a historian I want a decent public awareness of the past and careful reasoning about it. As a historian I want past suffering to be acknowledged and repaired so far as possible by precluding reversions to violence and repression. But I do not crave a wallowing in bathetic memory’. He ended his talk with the ‘hope that the future of memory is not bright’.⁷ Although in a more recent talk he distinguished between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ memory, with reference to the memories of Nazism and Stalinism respectively, in a fairly uncritical way suggesting that he has come to terms with the vocabulary of ‘memory’,⁸ Maier’s earlier argument – which reminds us that Derrida’s ‘perfect’ means both faultless and already given to the past – still should give us pause for thought.

In academia it will be no surprise to hear (again) that we have become